Cape Town - Comfort. The sweetest yet most heartbreaking word we have.
There’s no need for it if something unwanted hasn’t happened, or is about to happen. A hug. A stroke of the hair. The bullied child needing the mother’s hand or the father’s smile.
The father’s smile. That would be nice. If the father has been less than kind to the bullied child, what does the boy think? Does he think, but you’re my dad, shouldn’t you hold me and protect me? Shouldn’t you go to the school and do something about it, have it out with the teachers who don’t seem to be watching or who choose not to see? Shouldn’t you be popping by the boarding school hostel and having a word with the house master who’s job, you might think, would be to ensure every kid is happy and in a state of mind to concentrate on their school work? Instead of turning a blind eye when the boy is tormented again today, as he was yesterday and last week and last month and last term and will be again tonight, and tomorrow, and next week?
Comfort. You think about that when you’re the bullied kid, wondering what it must be like to be the bully. The boy thinking, I could give that kid over there a good klap, But you pause and think. And you know - that would turn me into what I despise. And maybe that’s it, maybe that’s why they do that. Because they hate what they are and they’re lashing out and showing something they’d like to think was bravado but is really cowardice; is really hiding from the bullies they are.
So you learn about irony. That there’s no comfort to be taken from knowing the bully’s biggest victim is himself. And so you find you have sympathy for the bully.
The school term is over, back at home, and you think, what would Dad do if I told him? He’d deny it, tell you to man up, to grow a pair, to sort that kid out. But it’s not one kid, Dad, it’s all of them.
Time finally places you in an adult’s body and you find you’re a different human being altogether. The bullied kid that you were seems like a movie you watched about somebody else. The dad you thought you knew turns out to have been somebody else altogether, a lost man whose alcoholism was born during a world war and whose estrangement from his second son was rooted in the death of his first at the age of six. When he put the barriers up so that he could not see or hear, turned from you because you reminded him of his loss.
And when you’re a married man yourself and a father, comes the time when you wish the old man had lived longer because the adult you, as far removed from the childhood you as Earth is from Mars, has joined all the dots, completed the complicated jigsaw puzzle and the picture of your dad in front of you looks nothing like your memory’s image of him.
And you find scant comfort in that, because it means you never will have the mano-a-mano conflab with him that you need. And so you do wonder if there’s any kind of place after life where you can find the ones you thought you knew, but never did really, and have it out. A Valhalla of veracity. A great hall where Odin has allowed the unknown sire to dwell because the Norse God has seen in him what you never imagined was there, and which you would like to find and study. And there will be hell to pay in that great hall before Odin restores calm.
You have to die first, but first you hope for a long life in which to attain the wisdom you always wanted to earn.
And your life comes to involve some of the simplest yet most comforting things. The writing of a word, and then another, until you have something that somebody wants to read. The loving of a child, and the protection of her when she finds her own bullies in life.
The cooking of a dinner for friends and the glass-clinking and story-spilling that enrich many tables. Every family breakfast and supper, all filled with the comfort of the foods that hug you and warm you through the years.
And always, always the bacon, the greatest of the comfort foods and the one to which you always return when you want to be lost in the bosom of nurture and love.
How to make a BLT:
Make it simply or indulge a little. As long as it contains bacon, lettuce and, yes, tomato, there’s not much else you need to feel as though you’re encased in a warm hug.
Use a roll, or slices of soft but firm bread, well buttered and make sure the lettuce is crisp as an iceberg, the tomato is ripe and perky and the bacon is smoky and done as you like it. Add mayonnaise if you like or a vinaigrette with a little mustard in it. Use raw tomato or first fry it in the pan in which you cooked the bacon. Season with salt (the tomato, not the bacon) and pepper.
Best eaten at the start of a day you’re dreading, or before doing something you’ve been putting off. Enjoy it many times in a long life.
Weekend Argus